In eighteenth-century England, large numbers of women, of all ages, could be found working in a plethora of trades. Printmaking was one of them. In London, women undertook diverse forms of paid labour; some were members of the City’s Livery Companies, and a significant number of them ran businesses.Footnote ¹ They worked as candlemakers, clockmakers, fanmakers, silversmiths, and milliners – to name just a few of their roles – and surviving trade cards and bill heads testify to their presence in a broad range of trades and professions, including those not typically considered ‘feminine’.Footnote ² Historians of women’s work have considerably altered our understanding of the roles women played in eighteenth-century London, demonstrating that they were clearly an essential part of the fabric of economic life in the English capital.Footnote ³

Countless women belonged to larger trade families and were expected to be part of the family enterprise, as Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall outlined in their influential book, Family Fortunes (1987).Footnote ⁴ Within the printmaking trade, the majority of women who made impressions likewise did so within the structure of the family workshop. As it was typical for families ‘in trade’ to live and work in the same building, it was in the traditional setting of their own homes that several women printmakers were taught how to make prints. In statistical terms, there were approximately forty women who lived, worked, and made prints in these circumstances from c. 1750–c. 1850.Footnote ⁵

This chapter is a broad account of the experiences of the printmaker’s family home-cum-workshop in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century England, focusing on the role and status of women within these families and spaces. Though the period in question was once thought to be one in which the spaces of ‘home’ and ‘work’ grew increasingly separate, historians such as Hannah Barker and Jane Hamlett have shown that in small family businesses, the domestic and commercial continued to coexist under one roof.Footnote ⁶ Weaving key examples throughout, this chapter will ask: What did women do, and not do, in the printmaker’s workshop? What forms of instruction were available to those women who were born into a printmaking family and were these opportunities comparable with the training offered to male relatives, such as their brothers? The case of Letitia Byrne (1779–1849), daughter of the engraver, William Byrne (1743–1805), will be considered alongside that of Ann (1782–1866) and Jane (1783–1824) Taylor, daughters of the engraver, Isaac Taylor (1759–1829). Isaac Taylor and William Byrne were two of those British printmakers who had witnessed and participated in London’s transition from a market of continental imports and artistic obscurity in the early half of the eighteenth century, to its dominance of the international print market in the latter half.Footnote ⁷ Crucially, both Isaac and William made the decision to train all their offspring – including their daughters – in their profession. Finally, the example of Elizabeth Cristall (1771–1853), an aspiring printmaker who was not born into the trade, will reveal that training within the family workshop was almost the only way for a young woman to enter the profession.

William Byrne, who lived ‘in the bosom of a numerous and worthy family’ at 79 Titchfield Street in Marylebone, was a distinguished engraver and print publisher, particularly of topographical single-sheet prints and book illustrations.Footnote ⁸ Around 1774, he married his first wife, Ann of Taunton (dates unknown), and the couple had five children: Anne Frances (b. 1775), Mary (b. 1776), Letitia (b. 1779), Elizabeth (b. 1784), and John (b. 1786).Footnote ⁹ Less than two miles from Titchfield Street, at 54 Red Lyon Street in Holborn, the engraver, Isaac Taylor, and his wife, Ann Martin (1757–1830), lived with their two daughters, Ann (b. 1782) and Jane (b. 1783). In 1784, rising rental costs and ongoing health issues drove the Taylor family to Suffolk, sixty miles from London, where they welcomed three sons: Isaac (b. 1787), Martin (b. 1788), and Jefferys (b. 1792). In her Autobiography, the eldest daughter, Ann, describes the exact moment when she began to learn her father’s trade: ‘It had been on the 12th of July 1797, when I was in my sixteenth year, that the design always kept in view of educating Jane and me to engraving as a profession, was first put into practice.’Footnote ¹⁰

It may seem unsurprising that many women printmakers were trained by a father or relative. Indeed, it has been taken as a given in art historical scholarship that early modern women artists ‘received their training in the arts as a result of being related to male artists’.Footnote ¹¹ However, as Martin Myrone has recently argued, these observations ‘have been allowed to remain as generalities’.Footnote ¹² Both print scholars and feminist art historians have been largely ignorant of the gendered mechanisms of the eighteenth-century family workshop environment and of the role of women within these overlapping commercial and domestic spaces.Footnote ¹³ This chapter will therefore highlight the centrality of the family workshop in framing and encouraging women’s printed productions, exploring the opportunities – and challenges – that being born into a trading family presented.

Apprenticeship

Apprenticeship was the formal training system implemented by many professions and trades across Europe in the eighteenth century.Footnote ¹⁴ A premium was paid for an apprentice to be bound to a master, usually around the age of thirteen.Footnote ¹⁵ Typically, the student would board and work with that master and would be instructed in their specialist line of work.Footnote ¹⁶ In London, girls had been apprenticed since at least the fourteenth century.Footnote ¹⁷ Yet Amy Louise Erickson’s recent research on eighteenth-century female apprentices in the London Livery Companies concluded that, on average, their numbers formed only one per cent of apprentices registered by guilds, and only five per cent of apprentices paying premiums.Footnote ¹⁸

As most printmakers operated beyond the jurisdiction of the City of London, apprenticeship in the printmaking trade was not a necessity, but could be undertaken to bolster connections within the book trade.Footnote ¹⁹ Timothy Clayton states that the standard fee for an engraver’s premium was around £50 in England in 1740, rising to around £100 by 1775, though this depended on the skill and reputation of the master.Footnote ²⁰ Unfortunately, as Erikson has noted, there is no proper study of apprenticeship premiums in the eighteenth century, and so it is hard to make comparisons with other trades.Footnote ²¹

Print scholar David Alexander, whose pioneering research on women printmakers has been central to my research, previously noted only two cases where young women were formally apprenticed to an engraver in this period.Footnote ²² These were Caroline Kirkley (c. 1775–1823), the daughter of Sir Joshua Reynolds’s servant, Ralph Kirkley, and Ann Probin (c. 1773–c. 1819), daughter of the gunmaker, John Probin.Footnote ²³ Both Kirkley and Probin were apprenticed to John Raphael Smith on 1 April 1789, for five years, for a £50 premium each.Footnote ²⁴ By 1789, both young women were advanced in age for apprentices: Caroline was around nineteen years old, while Ann was around twenty-one. Though the typical printmaking apprenticeship was seven years, it was not uncommon for there to be exceptions to this rule and, as Erickson has revealed, female apprentices were more typically bound for a shorter period than their male counterparts. The £50 fee was hardly a substantial sum but it might be that Kirkley and Probin did not live with Smith, and that this was reflected in the cost of the indenture.Footnote ²⁵

It is very possible that Probin and Kirkley were apprenticed to Smith because his wife and daughters also lived in the family workshop.Footnote ²⁶ (Smith’s daughters, Emma and Eliza, also made mezzotints. Emma, in particular, made a number of technically sophisticated mezzotints in the early nineteenth century, which were highly praised in the contemporary press.Footnote ²⁷) Having a group of women present in the household may well have appealed to Probin and Kirkley’s families, concerned, for the sake of propriety, about their daughters training in a male-dominated trade. It is likely to have been for this reason that, in September 1806, the bookseller, William Hayley (1745–1820), approached the engraver, Caroline Watson (1760/1–1814), to take on a young woman, ‘Little Fanny’, as an apprentice.Footnote ²⁸ Watson, however, declined, stating:

Furthermore, it appears that Hayley suggested that Little Fanny could undertake the duties of both apprentice and servant, which Watson firmly protested: ‘I think you will see that the two characters of pupil and servant cannot be united in the same person. The steady attention which drawing and engrave [sic] require must not be interrupted by domestick business.’Footnote ³⁰ It is notable that Hayley had suggested to Watson that Little Fanny could undertake domestic responsibilities alongside her professional training; had the apprentice been a young man, it is highly unlikely that he would have made the same proposal.

This lack of female apprentices in the printmaking trade reinforces the conclusions drawn by Erikson, who summarised that ‘apprenticeship registers record tiny numbers of girls receiving training’.Footnote ³¹ Yet, even set against such figures, which show girls were apprenticed to the London trades in a significantly smaller number than men, there seems to have been a disproportionately tiny number of young women apprenticed in the English printmaking trade.

The Family Workshop: ‘fitting us for self-support’

Rather than undertaking formal apprenticeships, many women printmakers who were born into printmaking families were expected to contribute to the family enterprise. As Priscilla Wakefield argued in her Reflections on the Present Condition of the Female Sex (1798): ‘The knowledge of a trade is a probable means which ought not to be neglected, of enabling them to give their assistance towards the support of their family.’Footnote ³² Printmakers, like many other trades and professional peoples, often trained their offspring so that they could support the family and the household’s economy. In utilising the labour of their children, family funds were saved from being spent bringing in additional help.

Parents also taught their children so that, after their own retirement or death, their offspring had the skills to be self-supporting, or at least to be able to gain meaningful employment. These skills could be utilised in marriage to form an economic partnership, but they could also be used for independent means should the individual decide not to marry, or indeed, be unable to afford to marry. For engravers such as William Byrne, the assistance of his five children in the workshop was crucial, particularly after he needed more income to weather the collapse of the print market in the 1790s, caused by the revolutionary wars with France. Significantly, his training would also allow his daughters to earn an independent living after his death, if they remained unmarried. Indeed, he may well have feared being unable to find dowries for his four daughters. William likely shared the same sentiments as the painter, Thomas Gainsborough (1727–1788), who wrote in a letter to a friend in 1764 that he would teach his daughters ‘to paint Landscape; and that somewhat above the common Fan-Mount stile [sic] … that they may do something for their bread’.Footnote ³³

Most unusually, Ann and Jane Taylor were given an independent income for their labour in their father’s workshop. This began in their teenage years, as Ann recalls:

To be sure, Isaac Taylor clearly cherished his family, yet paying his daughters for their labour may also have been a subtle way of instilling in them the importance of maintaining an independent income should they not marry.

Instruction, Collaborations, and Networks

The instruction offered to women in the family print workshop was likely to be enormously varied, changing according to shifting domestic concerns, socioeconomic circumstances and the size of the family at any particular time. The art of making an intaglio print – the family of techniques in which an image is made by incising into a printing plate – was, of course, the most important skill that could be taught to a prospective engraver. In the workshop, from a young age, perhaps even as young as seven, both apprentices and offspring would receive face-to-face training, covering all aspects of intaglio printmaking. Typically, this would have encompassed verbal instruction and correction, but also hands-on tuition, providing crucial opportunities to observe and imitate the day-to-day work involved in making a print. Tasks were numerous and varied, and would develop in complexity over the course of the apprenticeship. The pupil would begin by performing jobs such as tidying the workshop and learning where all the necessary tools were housed. They would then progress to preparing the copper sheets – trimming, polishing, and arranging them – as well as ‘grinding the ink’ and preparing the resulting waxy, acid-resistant ground necessary for the etching method.Footnote ³⁵

Though much of what can be said is speculative, contemporary advice literature aimed at the parents of prospective apprentices does provide us with some key information about the skills required of the printmaker’s apprentice. ‘A Genius for Drawing’, as Robert Campbell notes in The London Tradesman (1747), was crucial, as was an acquaintance ‘with Painting … a nice Judgement in the Works of the most famous Artists, and perfectly Masters of the Doctrines of Light and Shade, in which their art consists’.Footnote ³⁶ According to Campbell, the education offered to the apprentice ‘ought to be pretty liberal’, though the hopeful student should already be possessed of a few informal qualifications and skills:

Campbell’s account would have made attractive reading for any parent who wished to enrol their son into the printmaker’s trade: his account refers only to ‘man’ or ‘men’; likewise he frequently uses the pronoun ‘he’.Footnote ³⁸ He does include a discussion of female traders and apprentices elsewhere in his guide, in his chapters ‘the Milliner’, ‘the Comb-Maker’, ‘Cap-Maker’, ‘Stay-Maker’, and the ‘Mantua-Maker’. This indicates that it was those trades that were primarily open to female apprentices. Indeed, Erickson’s work on milliner apprentices confirms that this was the case; ‘Clothing trades accounted for sixty per cent of all the masters and mistresses taking female apprentices.’Footnote ³⁹

Surviving impressions, such as Letitia Byrne’s Animals Etched by Letitia Byrne from the Most Esteem’d Masters, also give us visual clues as to the training undertaken by some printmakers. In 1795, aged only fourteen or fifteen years old, Letitia made a set of thirteen etchings after prints by a variety of seventeenth-century Dutch artists, revealing that her father had given her access to significant, imported continental prints by some of Europe’s most accomplished and celebrated landscape and animal painters. Published by Darling and Thompson on 1 January 1795, the frontispiece of this series (Figure 5.1) is a confident interpretation of a work by the pioneering animal painter Paulus Potter (1625–1654), etched after his death by his fellow countryman, Marcus de Bye, in 1664.Footnote ⁴⁰ Like de Bye, Letitia purposely and clearly asserted her authorship – and her link to her family trade – by etching her name onto the rock in the foreground of the print. Her careful translation reveals how, at a young age, she had managed successfully to acquaint herself with the tonality and marks of de Bye’s etching. She made some subtle changes to the composition, for example adding horizontal shading on the stone and removing it in the sky, but the etching corresponds very closely, even in size, to the Dutch print.

Figure 5.1 Letitia Byrne, after Paulus Potter and Marcus de Bye, Frontispiece to Animals Etched by Letitia Byrne From the Most Esteem’d Masters, Published by Darling and Thompson, London, 1795.

Etching, 14.5 × 18 cm. Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.

Letitia was the only one of the Byrne children who created impressions for the London market at such a young age, indicating that her skill with the etching needle was notable within her large, artistic family. Detailed in their execution, these prints indicate her solid technical grounding and the quality of the material available to her. William Byrne’s use of prints by the Dutch masters in his training process was not uncommon. In the studio of the reproductive engraver, copying the prints of previous masters was an important exercise, and had been since the sixteenth century. Yet, along with teaching them to etch by copying the prints of older, famed Masters, William also took his children’s training beyond the studio, so that they could practise their draughtsmanship. In his famous diary, the artist Joseph Farington (1747–1821), a close friend of the family, detailed: ‘Byrne goes to Windsor tomorrow for a few days with his family to afford them an opportunity of drawing from trees in the Park.’Footnote ⁴¹ Sketching en plein air does not appear to have been standard practice in Britain for those training to be engravers, and probably highlights William’s particular determination to give his children a thorough artistic education. It also demonstrates the benefits of being born into a printmaking family: it is highly unlikely that William Byrne’s apprentices also benefited from this development opportunity.

Another one of Letitia’s early forays into etching plates for the European print market was for large, topographical publications, collaborating on impressions with her father. Donnington Castle, made for the ambitious publication, Britannia Depicta, and also published in January 1805 as a single sheet print, is co-signed by Letitia and her father: ‘Engraved by W. & L. Byrne’. Made after a drawing by J. M. W. Turner (1775–1851) who provided William with watercolours to translate into engravings, the image depicts the gatehouse to the ruined fourteenth-century castle, overlooking the Lambourne Valley.Footnote ⁴² Letitia and her father have faithfully interpreted Turner’s charming early watercolour in the more complex and laborious processes of etching and engraving; most of the plate was etched, but engraving was added to strengthen parts of the composition. It is difficult to ascertain which parts of the print Letitia put her hand to, and which parts William created. Yet, given William’s experience with the burin, it is possible that Letitia made the initial etching of the castle, the landscape, and the human figures, with William finishing the plate by engraving the sky. Letitia had already demonstrated her skill in making prints of animals in their natural habitats, so it is possible that she etched these as well as some of the finer details in the foreground of the image. As we can see in the publication line, William published the jointly signed print from their home-cum-workshop at 79 Titchfield Street. In doing so, Letitia’s name and her familial association with the trade was advertised to the market for high quality, topographical prints and illustrated books.

Though familial relationships were crucial, wider associations of friendship and patronage were also of paramount importance within the printmaking trade, and the artistic network that a printmaker built during years training in the workshop would prove essential over their career. Letitia and her siblings benefited from the convivial environment provided by her father in their home-cum-workshop, where it is certain they would have been introduced to a host of the key players in British art. In his diary, Farington details the numerous dinners that took place at the Byrne home. Often, he draws the layout of the seating plan, which makes it clear that all William’s artistic children were present at these events, partaking in the networking that was so crucial to commercial success. Joseph Farington became a very important supporter and promoter of the work of Letitia and Elizabeth Byrne, in particular, loaning them his landscape drawings to copy, and offering them his advice on the quality of their productions, particularly those pieces that they hoped to submit to London’s public exhibitions. ‘Byrne I drank tea at’, Farington wrote in August, 1801, ‘I went to make some remarks to his youngest daughter on her drawings.’Footnote ⁴³

Similarly, Ann Taylor records her father taking her to London, when she was eighteen years old, with the specific intent of introducing her ‘to several artists of note’. She recalls meeting William Byrne and his daughters:

That Isaac Taylor sought out William Byrne suggests that he was specifically keen for his daughter to meet other young women who were likewise being trained in the profession. This points to the gendered networking that clearly took place between such women, creating friendships that could be vital in male-dominated artistic communities.

‘Supra’ and ‘Infra’

Though boys and girls had much the same training in the printmaking workshop, there were some key differences in their experiences. Women’s labour within the home was of course not limited to ‘work’ that generated an income; the chief female duty in all classes in the period was believed to be those of a responsible family member, fulfilling duties bestowed by God. A woman should, it was averred, be respectful of the family hierarchy and dependent on the men within it. As the Reverend James Fordyce, in his hugely popular Sermons for Young Women (1766), reminded his readers, it was ‘those family duties for which the sex are chiefly intended’.Footnote ⁴⁵ Fordyce’s view is representative of the pervasive, normative ideals that were firmly established in eighteenth-century Britain concerning women, femininity, and the associated domestic, familial responsibilities. These ideals were circulated in contemporary literature, from sermons like Fordyce’s (continuously reissued throughout the eighteenth century) to monthly periodicals.

Furthermore, as the home and workplace of the printmaker so often coexisted throughout this period, these familial responsibilities often took place within the same spaces as professional ones. The work done by women for the business could therefore be undertaken flexibly alongside their domestic roles. Though, as seen, Caroline Watson argued that learning the art of engraving ‘must not be interrupted by domestick business’,Footnote ⁴⁶ Ann Taylor recollects that she and Jane were engaged in a carousel of labour, whereby one daughter would assist the mother with her household chores whilst the other assisted the father with his printmaking:

Ann’s account indicates that only she and Jane undertook these household duties; their brothers were not required to contribute in this regard. The training of women printmakers within the family home, then, may not have always been as systematic as that of their male siblings. Yet, Ann also notes that she and Jane could both be ‘withdrawn’ from family duties if her father gained more work that would require their assistance:

Women who worked alongside their male relatives in the family workshop were not challenging idealised domestic codes, nor were they acting beyond the boundaries of acceptable feminine behaviour. They were still concerned with feminine respectability, and their labour – both domestic and in the workshop – conformed to the ideal of a good wife or daughter, alleviating some of the pressures placed on the paterfamilias, and thus performing her necessary duties for the family.

Struggling ‘with want and means of connection’

The example of Elizabeth Cristall, a young woman who was not born into a printmaking family, demonstrates the importance of that unit for providing training and creating artistic and economic opportunities for young women. Around 1792, Elizabeth moved into shared lodgings with her older brother, Joshua Cristall (c. 1767–1847), at 28 Surrey Street, Blackfriars Road.Footnote ⁴⁹ Joshua and Elizabeth were two of four children of the mariner, Captain Alexander Cristall, and his second wife, Elizabeth Batten, and the family had settled at Rotherhithe, where Alexander had set up his own yard ‘making masts, blocks and sails’.Footnote ⁵⁰ Though the elder brother was trained in this family trade, his siblings had artistic aspirations.Footnote ⁵¹ The art historian, John Lewis Roget, writing in the late nineteenth century, informs us that they ‘had to struggle, not only with want and means of connection, but against the opposition of parents and friends’.Footnote ⁵² After serving an apprenticeship with William Hewson, who sold china and glass, Joshua intended to set up a printmaking partnership with his sister, Elizabeth, but they were firmly discouraged by the engraver, Thomas Holloway (1748–1827):

When Thomas Holloway informed Elizabeth that ‘she could not be taken as an apprentice’, he was speaking from his experience as a highly successful engraver, working at the heart of the London trade. Despite this, however, Elizabeth did try her hand at printmaking. One aquatint print by her survives, though is not clear how she learnt this technique.Footnote ⁵⁴ Brother and sister worked together on the impression: Joshua provided his sister with a drawn portrait of their friend, George Dyer (1755–1841), and it is probable that this was an attempt by the siblings to break onto the London market. Dyer, an author and advocate of political reform, must have agreed to Joshua drawing his portrait, Elizabeth etching it, and the brother publishing it on 1 May 1795.

Elizabeth Cristall’s print of George Dyer is the only work known by her. The resulting impression demonstrates a capable and promising talent for such a young and inexperienced hand. Yet the lack of training opportunities open to her, because of her sex and lack of family connection to the trade, appear to have effectively ended her printmaking career. It has been recently suggested that she went on to live with her elder sister, Ann Cristall, and became a tutor, possibly at Lewisham Grammar School.Footnote ⁵⁵ Joshua, on the other hand, went on to train as a student engraver at the Royal Academy and became a founding Member of the Old Watercolour Society, going on to become its President.Footnote ⁵⁶ It is only through records of his distinguished artistic career that we gain any insight into the aspirations of his sister.

Conclusions: Print and Prejudice?

The printmaking family was critical to the life and subsequent output of the professional woman printmaker. Indeed, having a close (usually male) relative in the trade was really the only way that a woman in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century England could learn this specialist art and earn a living from it. Such was the importance of the family workshop that Elizabeth Cristall, as we have seen, was discouraged from working as an engraver because she could not be taken on as an apprentice, nor did she live ‘with a father or relative who could instruct her’.Footnote ⁵⁷ Aside from the notable exceptions of Caroline Kirkley and Ann Probin, girls were not taken on as official apprentices within the English printmaking trade.

The printmaker’s home-cum-workshop was a highly gendered space, though scholars have largely failed to recognise it as such. As Ann Taylor recollected, girls were likely to have to manage their time training in the workshop alongside their domestic responsibilities. In the Taylor’s home-cum-workshop, these household labours – which included cooking, washing, and needlework – were entirely female duties. Ann and Jane’s three brothers, meanwhile, would have benefited from their father’s continuous systematic and rigorous tutelage. Nevertheless, as exemplified by the Byrne family workshop, the instruction offered to sons and daughters on the whole could be comparable. Boys and girls were both highly trained in printmaking, giving them the core skills and vital artistic networks through which they could assist the family unit and earn a living in the future. If born into a supportive family workshop, female printmakers like Letitia Byrne were able to capitalise on their familial connection to the trade. They could take the opportunity to collaborate with more established relatives and go on to achieve significant artistic and commercial success in a challenging urban print market.